Advent
by m.jules
Summary: He doesn't know it isn't her idea.  She doesn't know how to tell him.


**Title:** Advent  
**Author:** m.jules  
**Fandom:** Firefly  
**Pairing:** Mal/River  
**Prompt:** 92, "Christmas"  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Word Count:** 1805  
**Disclaimer:** Joss's. Love, not money.  
**Author's Notes:** This is for **unanon**'s specific (and evil) bunny. It is angsty, it does not have a happy ending, it has nothing to do with my other universe, and it contains what essentially amounts to physical activity between two ostensibly consenting adults. I don't know if I accurately conveyed what was going on, but **unanon** can be the judge of that. :-)

This has nothing to do with the movie, so it is spoiler free. But just to make sure y'all didn't miss it, I'll repeat my **Warnings: Angst. No Happy Ending. Not tied in with my other prompt-universe.**

Thank you to **mollita** for her support. She is an excellent hand-holder. :-)

* * *

She's been sitting still for the past hour, hearing nothing but the icicle harmonies of the stars and the gentle alto hum of _Serenity_'s contentment. It's so quiet here; _Serenity_ has insulated her from the noises of the crew's minds and she could even hear herself think if she particularly cared to. But she'd just as soon listen to the silence, and she closes her eyes to focus on it.

She's cool, fresh, like early spring snow, blending in with the chill of the metal floor she is sitting on. The cockpit is her favorite place to hide, whenever she can sneak over the catwalk quietly enough to get there without someone hearing her and herding her out to other areas where there's less vital stuff for her to break. Somedays it makes her laugh and others it makes her sad, knowing that they don't think she knows enough not to gum up this ship that loves her so and wraps her in its own namesake.

Her attention narrows to her breathing and she imagines the sight of her warm breath puffing cloudlike into the cool air that surrounds her, thinks of comforting things like snow at Christmas and sucking icicles that Simon broke off the eaves for her. Flashes of cold metal and cold hands and cold exam tables threaten the edges of her mind and _Serenity_ shudders and the stars hold their breath, waiting to see which memories will win.

She struggles to hold on to the hallways of her childhood home, multicolored lights strung around the outside and the blinking of the Christmas tree inside -- the holidays were always her favorite time of the year; free from the boredom of classes that couldn't keep up with her and free to play with Simon for as long as she could drag him away from the Cortex and his textbooks. Free to feel his adoring eyes on her -- and she needed that. She still does; still needs to know that her fragility doesn't go unnoticed beneath the power that she possesses... that possesses her.

Power that cruel men tried to dig out of her with scalpels and lobotomies and cold, cold hands that felt like they might reach into her belly and scoop out all the tissues and organs, stomach and intestines and virgin womb and the trembling center of her soul that rests somewhere between her ovaries and her liver.

Just when the icy pressure of the lab table against her back threatens to overwhelm her, there is the lightest flicker of warmth that breaks in and she sees the fireplace by her father's chair. All the comforts of home rush back to the forefront of her battered mind and she imagines the smell of fir trees and oranges and apples baking in cinnamon-honey. The fire glows brighter and the warmth increases, curling up from her abdomen and making her breasts tingle. It spreads down into her thighs, makes her legs feel restless, makes her feel like she's missing something that should be pushing into her down there.

Her lips feel naked and she presses a hand against them, muffling the cry that rises in her throat when her tongue begins to run over the back of her teeth, looking for something it isn't tasting yet, seeking soft flesh with a different flavor from hers.

The sound of boots scuffing the floor startles her and she whirls, her cheeks flushed with the heat of that Christmas fireplace though the air around her is still cold, and when she sees him there she instinctively knows that it is his taste she is missing, his pushing she is craving, and he opens his mouth to speak to her but she's on her feet before more than a breath can escape his lips and she presses her mouth to his, hungry, seeking, desperate for firewood.

He's startled but recovers quickly, his hands coming up to her hips and then sliding around to her back, pressing her against him, and it isn't enough and something inside of her wants to try climbing him like a tree, imagining bare feet curling around his knees that wouldn't be as rough as tree bark but would give her enough purchase to climb up, up, up to the crown to the secret sky that she is sure she can hear calling her through the leaves. His tongue tangles with hers and the heat of it startles her. She realizes the fire is in him and _needs_ to get to it, tries to figure out how she can pry open his skin and slip inside to be warmed by that fire.

A litany of words pours into her head for a moment and is just as quickly squelched and she has the barest of realizations that he has stopped himself from thinking too hard about this -- in fact, stopped himself from thinking of much at all except the way he wants to be inside her the way she wanted to climb inside him and breathes relief in her mind that, unlike her, he can manage it, at least in a limited way.

She's eager to let him in and pulls at him insistently, her fingers curling around his suspenders, and when he starts to slip out of them she panics, thinking he is evading her, and latches on to his shirt instead. He moans into her mouth and it isn't until she feels the metal grating on the floor pressing into her back with his heavy weight still pressed against her that she realizes he wasn't trying to sneak away at all. His fingers cover hers and guide her to his buttons and she is suddenly overwhelmed with the need to feel them slip through the cloth that catches them, needs to feel the heat of his skin, needs to be next to the fire.

She gets his shirt open and just as the palms of her hands curl over the scarred skin that is stretched tight across the bulge of his pectoral muscles, his hips jerk against hers and she is again made aware of a yawning kind of hunger between her thighs. The almost-sharp hardness that digs into her past two layers of fabric is _lìng rén jing yì_ and she gasps, her legs tightening convulsively around him.

That need to be filled overpowers her again and she moves her hands to his waist, pulling on the fabric of his breeches. He groans into her mouth and shoves her skirt up her thighs, exposing her to the cool of the air, but she's drowning in flames by now and barely feels it.

"Need..." he gasps as her fingers work the button on his pants. "Need to... _ràng wo li bian, niu._"

She thinks she should answer yes, should at least nod, but the part of her that decides speech and action is strangely frozen, sublimated beneath this creature that _needs_. The craving in her bones animates her limbs, and at that moment, she feels strangely separated from it.

She stays that way, strangely cool outside the warmth of that fire, as if she's holding her hand out to a candle but not quite close enough, though her body arches and curls and her hands dig into his shoulders and her hips welcome him in, and her mouth forms gasps and puffs of air and her breathing catches in her throat like the embryo of a sob. He moves and moves and pushes like she'd wanted but she still feels empty and too-full at the same time, and somewhere in her head she realizes that it hurt, and it still stings a little, but none if it is really filtering in.

It's as if the snow has started falling again, drawing her to the window away from the fire, softly padding every sound that would otherwise echo, muffling everything and making her eyes want to close and just allow her body to cool, to become one with the fogging pane beneath her fingers.

In her mind she is breathing on the glass, writing her name in the silver condensation first in English, then in Chinese, then in dead languages from Earth-that-Was, Egyptian and Celtic runes running down the glass like teardrops, when there is a foreign burst of warmth inside her and she shatters in surprise, crying out as if the window had broken and splintered tiny shards into her fingers.

Everything comes into crystallized focus and the weight on top of her feels like a burden, feels like being buried alive, and she whimpers, pushing futilely against it with her palms until she finally gets her arms fully under it and _shoves_ just as hard as she can, and he falls up and back and away from her in surprise, anger flickering across his face just before guilt crumbles his features.

"River --" he says, worried, but she scrambles to her feet, pulling her skirt down so it will cover her again, and stumbles backwards, collapsing and falling when pain shoots through her. "River?" he calls, and she can feel the cold wash of panic that paralyzes him, the bile that rises in his throat, the itching in his palms for a gun to turn on himself.

She gasps and shudders, curling into herself and hiding in the folds of her dress, behind her hair, and she barely hears and doesn't see when he gets to his feet and rearranges his clothing, feels when the fire in him goes out and becomes charred black crumbling pieces of cold firewood on the grating, feels when he disappears from the cockpit and can't make herself look any further to see where he's gone, to see if he's okay.

It's not his fault, she knows it isn't -- it isn't anyone's fault, just the way things get _lùan qi ba zao_ sometimes -- but she's too shattered right now to tell him so. She hopes _Serenity_ will tell him for her, because as much as she feels as if this has killed her, or some part of her, she doesn't know what will happen to her brain if he blows his out. He's been a fixture there since she woke up out of the cold seven and a half months ago, and if he's gone, she might go spinning off into space without any oxygen to spare.

So she curls up in that room in her mind, only now all the Christmas lights are asleep and the fire has gone out on the hearth and all that is left is the howling of the winter outside and the sad little cinder-girl inside, smeared with soot and the ashes of mourning.

* * *

**The End**

_lìng rén jing yì_ - surprising  
_ràng wo li bian, niu._ - let me in, little girl.  
_lùan qi ba zao_ - in a mess; fucked up


End file.
